More fake jobs

I recieved a glowing email offering me a job (in accountancy as I am underemployed there is a big difference) £19,000 a year not bad 32 hours a week. I was invited to attend an interview but on the morning of the said interview the job was mysteriously withdrawn. Which dashed my hopes, less than 3 hours later the same job identical in wording was readvertised online.

Surely there must be something against this sort of insidious practice in getting peoples' hopes up about getting out of their current situation?


Although I complain about it now this isn't new, when I first started out in 2004, I was asked to attend an actual interview in Cornwall just off Penzance from Manchester in the winter. Thats 373 miles away. I used to ride a motorbike at the time as it was cheap effective transport. I rode 359 miles in the rain and cold on mind numbing motorway costing me 6 gallons of petrol in and 6 gallons of petrol out £61 each way.

As I left the seemingly positive interview I felt rather happy about being given a chance, how wrong and naive I was then. I was told by SMS message that sorry the job did not actually exist they just wanted to interview graduates to see how much they should increase the pay of their current staff. Had I not been travelling up the A38 towards another fake job in Edinburgh I'd have probably been angry and broken something. It pains me now and I get chest pains considering the anger and betrayal I felt at that.

20 hours later I had gone to Edinburgh and attended a similar fake job, I was £200 down from my megre savings and had nothing to show for it.

Job centre plus not fit for purpose

Not fit for purpose

In a recent post I talked about how critical it is that Job Centre Plus (JCP) gets its act together to support the increasing number of us who are forced to rely on their support. These days I regularly hear quite demoralizing tales about the culture shock experienced by senior folk who have never been in a Job Centre before in their lives.

I saw a news report with the new Secretary of State - Yvette Cooper (well known to us in regeneration of course) - being challenged about recent negative public comment that JCP has been receiving. She talked about how the organisation has transformed itself since the 1970s.

Well I should hope it has!

But doesn't she miss the point? The issue is not how JCP (and its forebears) has improved over the past 40 years, but whether it is currently fit for purpose. The issue is: does JCP meet our needs today?

And I fear it does not.

Many of the changes have been superficial - new brand, new job titles, private-sector language, advertisements on the TV and radio. But the essence of what it does has not changed at its heart. Any marketing expert or business person will tell you that, to meet the needs of your customers, you have to accept that individual needs vary enormously. One size does not fit all. A process of customer segmentation defines their needs and products and services are developed to meet those needs. So someone with no qualifications looking to develop IT skills needs to be treated differently from a budding entrepreneur. The latter, in particular, needs to be taken out of the system and supported on their own individual journey.

Surely the time has come for the Department for Work and Pensions, JCP, government agencies, the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) and any other professional body in this field to get together to develop a new, more radical, segmented, truly customer-focussed model? A model that is fit for purpose and one that will adapt and endure future (inevitable) economic and social crises. Linking this to support for business - the creation of new businesses and support for those with potential - is critical.

The CIPD is predicting some 600,000 job losses in the public sector by 2012. Where else are the jobs we so urgently need going to come from?

One job lost every 30 seconds

Job lost every 30 seconds

Admittedly this is the daily mail we are talking about here, but the figures that are appearing, appear to be terrible. Various pundits predict it is going to get EVEN worse...

This isn't good news.

Fake jobs

These are a bane on the jobseeker, there are actually several kinds of fake jobs and I'll detail them here:


#1 Is a real job but advertised in such a manner that NOBODY can get that job. You might ask why on earth do people put these jobs up then if they do not want anybody. Well UK and French laws state that you can only hire people from outside the EU if you have advertised the job here for a certain period of time. Then you can give it to somebody outside the EU, in effect it is going through the motions.

#1.1 This can also exist as an internal job, this is somewhat normal in council jobs where the job description is so incredibly narrow somebody who already works in a lower job has been groomed to do this job. Hence this isn't really a job open to the market as it is again going through the motions.


#2 Is a more insidious kind of fake job, in that there is no actual job but jobs are advertised under vague terms. The client does not exist, the above jobs in the picture are all fake, out of about 40 or so jobs they are fake. But comes the decry but these sites charge money to post adverts, they do, but not always...

In that if you go to a jobsite and find no jobs what do you think?, its not a very good jobs website is it?. Hence certain jobs websites allow agencies to put up fake jobs for a lower or lesser fee so that it LOOKS as if there are plenty of jobs. I have questioned directors of such agencies before and they always deny that this is the case. Here is an example
Looks pretty convincing doesn't it? , however make a few mockups of your CV and post them, universally you will be invited to an interview, and yet all of a sudden the job is withdrawn mysteriously. The agencies always hide behind the wall of client priviledge so that there is no employer and people think that it is just their bad luck, but when this occurs constantly then your suspicions start getting aroused in that surely there cannot be so many withdrawn jobs and or filled vacancies?